Spiritual book roundup: 'Buechner 101' and more

By Barbara Mahany

Jul 26, 2016 | 12:08 PM

“Buechner 101,” a collection of Frederick Buechner's work introduced by Anne Lamott, “Our Father,” a picture book by Rainer Oberthür and Barbara Nascimbeni about The Lord's Prayer, and “Nurture the Wow” by Danya Ruttenberg are featured in this week's roundup of books for the soul. (Chicago Tribune)

Maybe once a generation, or once every few generations, someone is born with gifts literary and sacred in equal measure. A translator, perhaps, of the highest calling. One who can at once lift our souls and our sights by virtue of the rare alchemy of the poetic plus the profound. Therein lies the prophet. Therein lies Frederick Buechner, at 90, one of the greatest living American theologians and writers.

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In these collected works, "Buechner 101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner" — including excerpts from his Harvard Divinity School lectures, "The Alphabet of Grace"; a searing essay on his daughter's anorexia; a seminary commencement address on the hard truths of pastoring a flock of believers, doubters and everyday sinners — we are immersed in the depth and breadth of this rare thinker's gifts.

Anne Lamott, in her introduction, admits to being blown away by Buechner's capacity "to be both plain and majestic" at once. She ranks him side-by-side with C.S. Lewis, then declares, "No one has brought me closer to God than these two men." That alone might make you rush to pore over these pages.

This world sorely needs a prophet who reminds us to not give up our search for holiness amid the noise and hate and madness all around. Buechner, though, says it in words that shimmy through the cracks, burrowing deep within us, reverberating long after the page is turned. He writes: "We must learn to listen to the cock-crows and hammering and tick-tock of our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to us out of their depths. It is the function of all great preaching, I think, and all great art, to sharpen our hearing precisely to that end."

The questions are pure. The questions, profound. From the child's script, the surest path to heaven. And from the start, "Our Father," a breathtaking peeling back of a foundational prayer of so many Christian religions, shimmers with a simplicity that can't help but catapult our sacred questions to the highest heights.

Before beginning a line-by-line, word-by-word, meditation on the Lord's Prayer, as it's often called, this extraordinary picture book frames the prayer in the context of how it responds to the most essential — and possibly unsettling — questions: Where did the world come from? Why does it exist? Why am I here? Why do people die? What happens afterward?

In a voice that exudes comfort and heart-to-heart closeness the reader is told that these really are questions about God: Where is God? Why can't I see God? How can I talk to God?

Are these not the very questions pondered by legions of theologians? And yet, the answers found here — in a children's book from a Grand Rapids, Mich., publishing house with a long tradition of searching the globe for particularly illuminating children's text and illustration — are perhaps among the clearest ever penned.

Which is what makes this a book for the soul young or old or anywhere in between. Each line — alongside charming illustrations that beg to be studied closely — becomes a prayerful exegesis, unfurled in words that speak to the pure heart of the child. It's a book that will lull you into the sure and safe cove that is a building block of faith. And, chances are, you'll never again murmur mindlessly the words of "Our Father." Instead, you'll be awakened to the depths of its timelessness and its capacity to enfold the answers to all our deepest questions.

Nurture the Wow by Danya Ruttenberg, Flatiron, 320 pages, $24.99

The full title might be a bit unwieldy — "Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting" — and perhaps give pause at the mention of dirty diapers and divinity in the same breath, but go beyond it. As Danya Ruttenberg, a Chicago-based rabbi and mother of three, soundly argues, there is little sacred literature that considers parenthood as grounds for spiritual practice, nor that sees openings for transformational insight in the gritty parental monotony of feed, sleep, play, bathe, repeat.

Ruttenberg, named one of 10 "rabbis to watch" by Newsweek, and one of the "36 most influential leaders under age 36," by The Jewish Week, sets out to fill that void, and she does so with flashes of profound wisdom.

Where she's richest, perhaps, is in her deep and wide fluency in Jewish text and teaching. She laces her exposition with rabbinic wisdom and folk stories, dipping just as nimbly into her own tales from the messy domestic front. (As the mother of three under 6, she spills unvarnished first-hand accounts). Yet she's just as apt to quote poignantly from literary and religious traditions beyond her own Judaism; Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker activist, weighs in here as emphatically as Irish poet William Butler Yeats or American writer Cynthia Ozick.

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If the mark of a wise book is that its ideas keep stirring after the last page is turned, then this book makes the cut. Ruttenberg seeks spiritual instruction in the sheer boredom of parenting and argues that to love your own children is to crack open the heart in ways that make us love, more deeply, the whole of the world. Her chapter on prayer especially resonates as Ruttenberg coils into the depths of prayerfulness, alternately defining prayer as "work of the heart," or, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, a "humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living." Bringing it home, Ruttenberg writes of a friend who found that "holding a sleeping baby had begun to feel much more like worship to her than sitting with the prayerbook." Amen to that.

Barbara Mahany is the author of "Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door;" her next book, "Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving," is due out in early 2017.